The effectiveness of a program designed to train
teachers to use more interaction in ESL literacy classrooms in terms of changing
teachers’ attitudes toward teaching reading.

Learner
participants

One-thousand four-hundred three ESL reading teachers
from Texas community-education centers. The teachers were involved in the training
as part of a statewide initiative to increase literacy and literacy levels.
The program was implemented after nationwide studies indicated that nearly half
of the people of the United States adult population read at the lowest two levels
of literacy as designated by national standards. The teachers in this study
were learning new techniques and theories about ESL teaching in order to improve
their own practice. The participants ranged from professionally trained ESL
teachers to teacher aides and community volunteers. How many?

Teacher
participants

Three teacher trainers from a large Texas university
with expertise in TESOL and communicative pedagogy. Ideologically, the teachers
aligned themselves with literacy views that emphasize the need to move beyond
functional literacy, or the ability to function in society, to critical literacy,
or literacy for personal and cultural empowerment. They sought in their teacher
education sessions to help teachers re-evaluate the nature of the student/teacher
relationship and to make the literacy curriculum relevant to the social issues
that students’ face.

Study
Design

A needs assessment was sent to each educational center,
and the teacher education workshops were modified to fit the needs as expressed
by teachers ateach center. Then the
teacher educators held a professional development workshop. At the beginning
of each workshop, participants were asked to rate their needs for help or new
ideas on ten aspects of the critical literacy model using a Likert scale. The
workshops were designed to be participatory and to involve group investigations
and decision-making. To evaluate the overall effectiveness of the workshops,
the researchers then asked the participants to rate the effectiveness of different
aspects of the program on a Likert scale and to give comment on the most and
least helpful aspects of the program. To gauge attitude shifts during the conference,
the participants rated the same ten items related to critical literacy that
they had examined at the beginning of the conference. This time, they were asked
to indicate how useful they felt these concepts were to their own teaching.

Findings

In terms of the overall effectiveness of the teacher
development workshops, the researchers found that the participants overall were
very positive about the interactive nature of the workshop and were eager to
apply this pedagogical model to their own teaching. Their comments on the workshops
indicated increased understanding of the concept of critical literacy and the
importance of a participatory approach to teaching ESL literacy to adults. In
terms of the attitudinal shift, the researchers found that the participants
overall rated the aspects of critical literacy much higher after participating
in the workshops, which they interpret as evidence of the effectiveness of participatory
workshops towards introducing teachers to literacy pedagogy.

Comments
on the Study

All of the assessments in the study were completed
immediately following participation in the workshops, so there is no evidence
of long-term attitudinal shifts. Since all the data collected was self-report
data on attitudes, there is no evidence that the workshops had any effect on
the participants’ practice. Also, the use of statistics with their instruments
is troubling. Comparing scores on one scale based on teachers’ estimates of
their need to learn about a particular concept with their estimates of the usefulness
of the conference is not a fair comparison to uncover attitudinal change. A
teacher could find a concept very useful in practice, for example, but feel
that he already sufficiently understands the concept. The differences between
the Likert scale ratings of critical literacy concepts is as likely dues to
reasons like this as to any attitudinal shift.

Finally, no evidence is presented of the effectiveness
of the critical literacy model as a model for ESL literacy pedagogy. While the
model is theoretically and socially appealing, there is no evidence that it
is effective or that it is more effective for helping ESL speakers to read than
any other pedagogical model. Without such evidence, it is hard to see why changing
teacher attitudes toward literacy is a necessary or even positive step.

Implications
for Practice

Teacher development practices can be more effective
when they model the pedagogy that is advocated. There is a need for more understanding
of literacy pedagogy, and many practitioners are eager for more information
about teaching literacy.

Key Words

Teacher Education
Models of reading

Areas
for Further Research

Research should be conducted on the impact of different literacy pedagogy models
on learner attainment in literacy. Also, long-term investigations of the relationship
between teacher understanding of pedagogy and teacher practices should be undertaken
to evaluate the impact of teacher education.

The beliefs about
L1 and L2 literacy of non-literate immigrants in an English speaking community
and of their strategies to compensate for their lack of literacy in both their
first language and in English.

Learner
participants

Nine monolingual Spanish L1 adult immigrants in Toronto,
Canada. Four of the nine participants had little or no literacy skills in Spanish;
none were functionally literate in English.

Study
Design

The researchers first summarized national-level census
statistics about immigrant populations in Canada, their education levels, and
implications about their literacy. They concluded that national-level statistics
could only supply a surface understanding of immigrant populations and their
literacy needs. To supplement the census findings, they interviewed nine Spanish
monolinguals who were non-literate in English about their literacy needs and
beliefs.

Findings

Speakers without English literacy skills used several
strategies to function in society. These strategies included establishing relationships
with neighbors, ESL classmates, or officials who could help them read or write
letters or fill in forms or complete commercial transactions. Those without
Spanish literacy skills used these same strategies for written communication
in Spanish as well. They also relied more heavily on memory, memorizing subway
or bus routes because they could not decode signs, or by memorizing product
logos in order recognize bills or choose food at the stores.

All of the participants felt confident in their abilities
to perform their jobs without being literate, usually because they could use
visual cues to do their work. However, they felt that they were ineligible for
promotions at work because of their limited ability.

The participants who were also illiterate in Spanish
expressed dissatisfaction with their experiences in adult ESL courses. Many
were ashamed of being illiterate. They could not participate in activities that
involved reading and writing in English, and felt lost in grammar lessons. Because
they could not write down new words or phrases, they could not retain as much
or review at home, or efficiently use Spanish-English dictionaries.

The participants universally agreed that it was more
important for them to become literate in Spanish than in English, and doubted
that they could improve their English proficiency without first becoming literate
in Spanish. They also felt that they could not be accepted by either the Spanish-speaking
immigrant community or by their own children without gaining literacy.

Comments
on the Study

Thorough, rich reporting and
use of examples.

Implications
for Practice

The focus on functional literacy (literacy skills
needed on the job or in official transactions) perhaps is aimed at the areas
of literacy for which learners can already compensate. Teaching personal literacy,
such as letter or personal history writing, may be more relevant for adult ESL
learners, especially those with low native language literacy.

The effectiveness of conventional ESL methods is
constrained by learners’ level of literacy in their first language. Teachers
should be aware of the special needs of non-literate learners.

Key
Words

Pre-literate learners
Reading skills transfer

Areas
for Further Research

Pedagogical approaches to help ESL learners compensate for L1 illiteracy should
be identified and evaluated.

The differences in intraword structural sensitivity
of adult ESL learners from alphabetic and non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds, the
differences between native and non-native speakers of English with respect to
intraword sensitivity, and the extent to which intraword sensitivity affects
ESL decoding ability. Intraword structural sensitivity refers to a reader’s
ability to use both phonological and morphological information in processing
words in print.

Learner Participants

The learners were forty beginning level ESL adults
enrolled in an intensive English institute. Twenty participants were native
speakers of Korean (a non-roman alphabetic language); twenty were native speakers
of Chinese (a non-alphabetic language). All the participants had studied English
in high school in the home countries and all had been in the United States for
less than six months at the beginning of the study. The two groups completed
the reading and listening sections of the TOEFL at the beginning of the study;
there were no significant differences in their mean scores on either test.

Six native speaker university students also completed
the tasks as an L1 reader control group.

Study
Design

An orthographic acceptability judgment task was created
using lists of frequent words. The letters of the words were rearranged to create
non-words. Some of the non-words were legal (possible) letter strings in English,
while others were illegal (impossible) letter strings in English. For example,
a word like double could be rearranged
to form the legal non-word boudel
or the illegal non-word ebdluo. Non-words
were divided into those that began with high frequency first letters in English
(letters that often appear at the beginning of a word) and those that began
with low frequency first letter in English. Thus, the non-words could be high-frequency
legal, high-frequency illegal, low-frequency legal, or low-frequency illegal.
Students were asked to judge whether the words were possible or not in English.
Their answers would indicate their understanding of English intraword phonology
and morphology.

Additionally, two decoding tasks were used. The first
consisted of fifty legal non-words that the students were asked to read. The
second was a homophone judgment test. The students were given thirty pairs of
words. The first word of each pair was a high frequency English word. The second
was a possible non-word (e.g., rain and rane). The students were
asked to judge whether the non-words were homophones of the high frequency word.

Findings

Students from both groups were better able to discriminate
between legal and illegal letter strings when they began with high-frequency
letters. This indicates that L2 readers do develop sensitivity to the positional
frequency of letters. The Korean speakers were better able to discriminate between
legal and illegal sequences when the words began with low-frequency letters,
which suggests that their L1 experience with an alphabetic language had helped
them to refine their intraword structural sensitivity.

There were also differences between the native speakers
of English and the ESL participants. The native speakers made similar judgments
to those of the ESL speakers on the legal letter strings, but were far more
consistently correct in judging illegal word strings. They made few errors in
judging illegal word strings, while the ESL participants accepted around 45%
of high-frequency and 40% of low-frequency illegal word sequences. This suggests
that one factor distinguishing native and non-native readers is the ability
to detect violations of orthographic constraints.

In terms of the affect of orthographic sensitivity
on decoding, there were differences between the Chinese and Korean speakers.
Whereas there was a significant correlation between intraword structural sensitivity
(as measured by orthographic acceptability tests) and decoding performance (as
measured by non-word and homophone tests) for the Korean speakers, there was
no such correlation for the Chinese speakers. This suggests that Korean speakers
utilize intraword sensitivity more than Chinese speakers in decoding. This could
indicate that the Chinese speakers rely still on the L1 whole word processing
strategies when reading in English, while Korean speakers rely on intraword
processing strategies that they can transfer from their L1 reading experience.

Comments
on the Study

The study is very well designed and controlled, and
the analysis is careful and well explained. It should be remembered that this
is a highly controlled laboratory experiment, and it is uncertain how the findings
relate to reading in a more natural setting. Also, it is important to note that
the experiment does not give any developmental information. We don’t know if
Chinese speakers eventually begin to process written English more like Korean
speakers do, and we don’t know if or when either group gains intraword sensitivity
similar to that of the native speakers.More information on the morphosyntactic structure of Korean would
be helpful in determining the affect of this factor for Korean speakers learning
to read English. The fact that spoken Chinese uses tones to transmit the semanticaspects of language, whereas spoken English uses phonemes that are more
or less mapped to graphemes in written English could also contribute to the
difficulties Chinese speakers have with English intraword processing.

Implications
for Practice

Intraword structural sensitivity affects text-processing
abilities. Teachers should help beginning ESL students, especially those from
non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds, to gain awareness of the phonological and morphological
information embedded in English words.

This study could be replicated using learners at different proficiency levels,
to see how the relationship between intraword structural sensitivity and decoding
develops over time. This study could also be replicated keeping track of response
times, to see if learners with alphabetic L1 backgrounds can make judgments
more quickly than learners with non-alphabetic L1 backgrounds.

Lantigne, B. & Schwartzer, D. (1997). The progress
of Rafael in English and family reading: A case study. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 41, 36-45.

Descriptive
study of

The progress of a Mexican immigrant student in a
community-based adult ESL and family literacy program. While increasing individuals’
English proficiency can have a positive impact on their lives, it is likely
that adding a family literacy emphasis to adult ESL can have a positive impact
on an entire family. This research sought to evaluate the impact of such a program
on one individual and his family.

Learner
Participants

Rafael is a Mexican immigrant in his fifties who
lives in a predominately Latino, low-income neighborhood. He and his wife are
the parents of seven children, all under the age of fifteen. The researcher
describes him as a caring, involved husband and father. Rafael works as a baker
and attends ESL courses in a community ESL program run in a local library. He
had limited formal education in his native language, but had achieved a reasonably
high level of Spanish literacy. He wants to learn English to improve his family’s
circumstances and his children’s future opportunities. He is described as an
inquisitive student with a real desire to learn. At the beginning of the study,
he had been studying in this particular program for five months.

Teacher
Participants

The primary researcher in this study is one of the
teachers at the community English center. This research was completed as part
of her master’s degree in TESOL (the secondary researcher was her academic advisor).
She approached this research because of her interest in family literacy and
in increasing opportunities for Latino-Americans. She introduced family literacy
to the class by exposing them to interesting children’s literature in the library,
which they were encouraged to take home to share with their children.

Study
Design

The case study followed Rafael’s progress over three
months in the family literacy program. The researcher gathered information on
his progress in English learning and in family literacy primarily through her
observations of him in class, analysis of his writing samples, and personal
interviews conducted in Spanish with a bilingual translator present. Data were
triangulated with informal conversations with Rafael and his family, interviews
with other teachers acquainted with Rafael, and Rafael’s test scores on the
program’s placement test and on the Basic English Skills Test (BEST).

Findings

Rafael generally improved his English skills during
the period of the case study. His writing samples progressively included fewer
errors and more accurate self-corrections. Based on the interviews, it seemed
that his listening comprehension skills also improved, and he gained several
levels on the Basic English Skills Test. His comfort with reading in English
and with reading to his children in English also improved. While at the beginning
of the program, he expressed reluctance to read to his children in English,
by the end of the program he and his children were engaged in reading together.
During visits to his home, his children chose books for him to read to them,
and continued to examine them after the reading ended. His children also accompanied
him to the English classes at the library, choosing books that they wanted to
take home and read together.

Comments
on the Study

The study makes use of data gathered in multiple
ways to give the reader a clear understanding of Rafael as a person and as an
English learner. It contrasts with a fairly common stereotype of Latino immigrants
as lazy or uninterested in learning English. It also gives clear examples of
Rafael’s progress in improving his oral and written English and the impact of
family literacy on his family.

However, it is important, as with all case studies,
to remember that the data was collected on one person only, and should be generalized
with caution. Also, three months is really quite a short amount of time to gather
case study data. We do not know if the progress Rafael made continued beyond
the study.

Implications
for Practice

Including family literacy in ESL adult literacy curricula
can help increase the exposure to reading that individuals and families receive.
It is possible that this could have a long-term impact on the entire family.

Key Words

Family literacy
Community English

Areas for Further Research

This study could be extended over a longer period of time, following the progress
of an individual and their family in family literacy over time. Also, quantitative
research could be done to determine whether these results are typical of participants
in family literacy programs.

The possibility of guessing the meaning of words
from context. While researchers who work in top down processing often list guessing
as a strategy that learners can use to overcome a lack of vocabulary, and while
extensive reading enthusiasts counsel beginning students to guess the meaning
of unknown words and continue reading, Laufer points out that this strategy
is both insufficient, and also often inappropriate. Basing her arguments on
linguistic analysis and on previous studies of vocabulary and reading, Laufer
presents reasons why bottom-up processing skills like attention to vocabulary
cannot be ignored.

Theory

Vocabulary studies have indicated that there is a
threshold of vocabulary for second language reading. (See, for example Alderson,
1984; Coady, 1997). In order to comprehend a text and in order for learners
to be able to transfer their first language reading strategies to the second
language, they must be able to comprehend 95 to 98% of the words in a text.
Some researchers believe that vocabulary knowledge is the single most important
predictor of reading comprehension. Top-down processing researchers have contended
that vocabulary knowledge is not as important as good top-down processing skills,
which include guessing word meanings from context. This study examines several
conditions that make guessing inappropriate, because readers are unlikely to
arrive at an accurate enough meaning of a given word to allow for comprehension.

Findings

The author divides her argument into three categories:
words that are unknown to the reader (the issue of vocabulary threshold), words
the reader mistakenly thinks s/he knows (false cognates and others), and words
a reader cannot guess the meaning of (the insufficiency of context).

When too many words in a passage are unknown, it
is impossible for the reader to apply L1 reading strategies. For example, a
reader cannot apply a “find the main idea” strategy if he does not understand
the ideas in the text at all. Being able to apply such strategies is contingent
on second language vocabulary knowledge. Additionally, human cognitive processing
limitations restrict understanding of reading to texts in which most of the
words are automatically understood. In other words, if a reader has to expend
mental energy to understand many of the words, he will not have the cognitive
capacity to pay attention to the overall meaning as well. This explains why
learners who are dealing with difficult texts may be able to comprehend sentences
without ever understanding the connection among sentences. In this case, a lack
of vocabulary knowledge short-circuits reading comprehension.

Likewise, reading comprehension can short-circuit
when learners think they know words that they really do not know. Examples of
this sort of short circuit occur when students do not recognize false cognates
or interpret idioms literally. They can also occur when students encounter words
with deceptively transparent meaning or morphological structure. For example,
a student might analyze shortcoming
by analyzing the component words and arrive at a meaning like a short visit. Short-circuits may also occur when students do not
recognize multiple meanings of a word, or when they confuse the meanings of
words that are phonologically or orthographically similar. When students do
not recognize that they do now know a word, they can invoke the wrong schema—thus,
bottom-up processing skills can thwart the benefits of top-down processing.

Lastly, there are many conditions in which word meanings
cannot be guessed. Laufer contends that words rarely occur in a sufficiently
redundant context for meaning to be inferred from context. Also, if the student
doesn’t know the words that provide contextual clues, he is unable to use the
context for guessing word meaning. Guessing also can only work if the student
is able to predict the meaning of the passage—if the student and the author
have similar schema for the concept being described. If the author’s schema
is unexpected by readers (possibly because of cultural differences), they are
more likely to guess word meanings that fit with their own, rather than the
author’s meaning.

Comments
on the Study

Laufer’s typology is very useful for understanding
why second language learners, especially at the beginning levels of literacy,
are unable to apply their L1 reading strategies or the strategies their teachers
teach. It is a clear argument against the complete reliance on extensive reading
to help learners increase their vocabulary, and an reiteration of the importance
of directing literacy learning, especially at the lower levels of proficiency,
towards bottom-up processing skills like vocabulary learning and recognition.

Implications
for Practice

While extensive reading is theoretically appealing,
it may not be applicable especially for beginning students. Vocabulary development
to the threshold level -- usually estimated at 3,000 words (Coady, 1997; Grabe
& Stoller, 2002) -- is essential for students to be able to read in the
second language.

Key Words

Vocabulary
Bottom-up processing
Predicting

Areas for Further Research

Researchers should examine the effectiveness of different vocabulary instructional
methods and the possibility of incorporating these into adult ESL literacy instruction.

The process of determining whether or not ESL adult
literacy students have learning disabilities and the effectiveness of a pull-out
tutoring program for students with learning disabilities. For this research,
a learning disability was defined as a life-long condition with presumed neurological
origin that interferes in some way with development or expression of verbal
abilities. There is little understanding of the effects of learning disabilities
on second language development or on possible treatments for students with learning
disabilities. Because both low English language proficiency and learning disabilities
are reflected in verbal skills, it is often difficult to determine whether or
not a student has a learning disability.

Learner
Participants

The learners were adult ESL students from various
ethnolinguistic backgrounds studying at a private English center in the United
States. The majority of the students were middle-aged or older, and many of
them had been forced to curtail their formal education in their native languages
before coming to the United States. Two classes with a total of fifty students
were chosen for the study. All of the students were assessed for possible learning
disabilities, and thirteen were eventually selected for tutoring.

Teacher
Participants

The classroom teachers were experienced ESL teachers
who had been teaching in the English center for several years. The teachers
were assisted by learning disabilities specialists from the Learning Disabilities
Association, who helped design and implement the assessment measures and tutor
the students presumed to have learning disabilities. The majority of the students
spoke either Russian or Vietnamese, so translators from these languages were
also brought in to assist assessment. A Hmong education assistant also participated
as a translator for Hmong, Thai, and Laotian.

Study
Design

The classes were tested at the beginning and end
of the project. All the students completed a basic English skills test and a
phonics inventory. They were also observed by their teachers and by a learning
disabilities specialist. One of the classes also submitted a native-language
writing sample and completed a learning styles inventory and an intelligence
test. These were used to determine which students possibly had learning disabilities.

The students identified as having learning disabilities
were pulled out of their classes twice a week for tutoring. The tutoring was
similar to that commonly used with native speakers of English with reading disabilities
such as dyslexia. It included extensive phonics training designed to improve
students’ phonemic awareness and understanding of sound/symbol correspondences
in English. The tutor used kinesthetic, auditory, and visual techniques to reinforce
the teaching. The tutoring was sequential, and mastery was required to move
to a new level.

At the end of the program, qualitative evaluations
of the program were collected from the learning disabilities tutor, the teachers,
and the students who had participated in the tutoring.

Findings

Some of the tests used in this study were deemed
inappropriate by the English center staff for determining whether or not limited
English proficient adults had learning disabilities. Tests that are normed with
reference only to native speakers may not be able to discriminate between language
difficulties and learning disabilities. One of the best measures for determining
whether a student did or did not have a learning disability was the native-language
writing sample and the educational histories given through interpreters. It
was learned that some of the students, for example, had never had formal schooling.
Their difficulties in the classroom were therefore more likely caused by difficulty
adjusting to the academic structure than to any neurological disorder. Additional
problems with identifying students with learning disabilities were prompted
by cultural issues. Many students thought that having a learning disability
was shameful and were reluctant to participate in tutoring. Some of the test
results were also compromised because students shared answers with their friends
to prevent their friends from failing and being stigmatized. The researchers
found that the nature of learning disabilities and the system of testing needed
to be explained carefully and sensitively in the students’ native languages.

The teacher and tutor evaluations of the program
made it clear that working together had allowed all involved to benefit from
each others’ expertise. The teachers learned many techniques that they had not
been aware of for teaching phonemic awareness, which were especially helpful
for working with the semi-literate students in the program. The tutors learned
to embed language instruction in cultural instruction—the norm in ESL but not
in other fields of language development. It also became obvious that commercially
developed resources for working with students with learning disabilities were
often inappropriate for the ESL population. Lessons that used more familiar
vocabulary or that built on common ESL themes would be more useful.

The teachers did indicate that the students who had
received tutoring made noticeable improvements in reading and writing, and post-tests
indicated that tutored students had increased their reading proficiency during
the program.

Comments
on the Study

The study is a good first step in understanding how
to identify and help adult ESL literacy students with learning disabilities.
A better description of the learners who were presumed to have learning disabilities,
as well as the criteria used to separate language deficiencies and learning
disabilities would have been helpful to those researching and working in this
field.

Implications
for Practice

ESL teachers and learning disabilities specialists
need to work closely together to integrate classroom language instruction and
learning disabilities tutoring. Teachers and tutors need to be sensitive to
cultural issues surrounding the identification and treatment of learning disabilities.

Key Words

Learning disabilities
Bottom-up processing

Areas for Further Research

ESL specific tests for identifying
learning disabilities should be developed, as well as materials designed specifically
for working with ESL students who have learning disabilities.

The automaticity of decoding skills of ESL learners
at different levels. The researchers wanted to know if more proficient readers
would decode more automatically, and therefore be able to apply meaning-based
strategies more than less proficient readers.

Learner
Participants

The participants in this study were twenty native
speakers of English who were university students and forty-four ESL students
enrolled in an intensive English program IEP). The ESL students were mostly
Japanese and had all received secondary school and some college education in
their native language.

Study
Design

The ESL participants were divided into two groups,
beginning and advanced, based on their placement tests into the IEP. All of
the participants were given two tasks: an oral reading and an oral cloze task.
On the oral reading, each participant read two 225-word passages out loud. The
native speakers were asked to count the number of lines in the passages as they
read in order to increase the memory burden on them and thus to increase the
number of errors they would produce. Errors were defined as anything that deviated
from the written passage. Errors were classified as meaningful (errors that
persevered the original meaning of the passage and conformed to English syntax)
and unmeaningful (errors that changed the meaning of the passage or violated
English syntax). Each of these categories was further divided into insertions,
deletions, word-order changes, and substitutions, and all errors were coded
as one of these.

For the cloze test, the participants were given the
first two or three lines of a new passage and asked to read them out loud and
then fill in the next word. The student was then given the correct response
and the process was repeated for the following two or three lines. There were
ten missing words; participant responses were coded as plausible or implausible
based on the syntax and the meaning of the passage.

Findings

On the cloze test, the author’s prediction that more
advanced readers would be better able to apply top down predicting strategies
was affirmed. The native speakers performed significantly better on the cloze
test than the advanced non-native speakers, who significantly outperformed the
beginning non-native speakers.

However, on the oral reading miscue analysis a different
pattern was found. The authors had predicted that more advanced readers would
make a higher percentage of meaningful errors. In this, the native speakers
had a significantly higher percentage of meaningful errors than did the non-native
speakers. However, there was no significant difference between the beginning
and advanced ESL students in the proportion of meaningful errors to total errors.
While the advanced ESL students made fewer errors overall, they made the same
percentage of unmeaningful errors. This is not the expected pattern if advanced
speakers are making decoding more automatic, and therefore able to expend more
resources toward interpretation.

The researchers conclude that the advanced level
students were not restructuring the reading process to make second language
reading more similar to first language reading. Like the beginning students,
they were still focused on perfect phonological decoding. While their higher
proficiency made this more possible, and they therefore made fewer overall errors,
they were still not reading the way native speakers do. Native speakers make
use of contextual clues and apply top-down processing. The researchers suggest
that the advanced ESL readers need to restructure the reading process, taking
their emphasis away from perfect decoding and increasing their application of
top-down processing strategies.

Comments
on the Study

The study presents interesting results and analysis
of the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in their
reading proficiency and behavior. It is an interesting application of reading
models to actual data, and an interesting use of data to challenge and shape
existing cognitive models of reading.

For purposes of clarity, it would have been better
for the researchers to give more information about the proficiency level of
the students involved, especially to give the reader more understanding of the
gap in proficiency between the beginning and advanced ESL learners. If the gap
is relatively small, for example, one could simply claim that the advanced group
had improved, but not yet automatized the decoding process.

Implications
for Practice

Even more advanced ESL students may not be able to
transfer meaning-based first language reading strategies into the second language.
Teachers may need to encourage good decoders to incorporate predicting strategies
into their reading process. Direct instruction of predicting strategies may
be necessary.

Key Words

Models of reading
Decoding
Top-down processing

Areas for Further Research

This research should be replicated
among readers of different cultural groups, since strategy use has been linked
to culture. Also, longitudinal research could investigate when the restructuring
is likely to occur.

The impact of different
workplace literacy programs on learners’ literacy beliefs and practices, on
learner’s families, and on learners’ productivity on the job. Some of the literacy
program sites included an ESL component, which will be discussed here.

Learner
participants

The learners were ESL adult workers at various job
sites in the United States. The jobs sites, all blue-collar industries such
as automotive or manufacturing plants, had instituted on-site literacy programs
for both ESL and native speakers in order to increase the functional literacy
of their employees. Employees could choose to take part in the programs. Many
did so with the hope that increasing their literacy in English would improve
their chances of receiving promotions into positions that demanded greater literacy
skills.

Study
Design

In each workplace, a combination of group interviews
and questionnaires were used to assess the impact of the program on the learners.
A structured interview based on Lytle (1990) was used to investigate the impact
of the literacy programs on learners’ beliefs, practices, processes, and plans.
Job performance ratings and employer data on attendance and productivity were
also considered.

Findings

After participation in workplace programs, ESL learners
made qualitatively measured improvements on the quality of their reading and
writing on the job. They also reported reading and writing more and with more
confidence, as compared to ESL speakers who did not participate in the programs.
They were observed to be more willing to ask questions at work as well, indicating
that increasing their literacy skills increased their confidence in their spoken
English as well. When questioned about their reading strategies, they reported
using more sophisticated reading strategies than workers who did not participate
in the program, and performed as well on a written test about job-related scenarios
as did native English speakers enrolled in workplace GED classes. After participating
in the classes, ESL workers were more likely to define themselves as literate,
and were more likely than non-participants to include reading and continuing
education as part of their future goals.

Comments
on the Study

The study gathered an exhaustive amount of information
about workplace literacy programs and showed positive results for workplace
instruction for both native speakers and for ESL participants. It is not surprising
that workplace literacy programs would be successful—on-site classes result
in lower absenteeism and closely connecting language instruction with the workplace
helps ensure that the instruction is immediately relevant to the students’ lives.
While the highly functional nature of the literacy courses described here makes
it unlikely that workplace instruction will lead to higher levels of literacy,
they seem to be a good first step in the literacy process for ESL speakers.
We need more information including comparisons with those English language who
didn’t take the classes. We also need to know the English proficiency and literacy
levels of the workers.

Implications
for Practice

When possible, literacy instruction for ESL adults
should have applications to their everyday lives. In this case, directing the
instruction to the participants’ careers led to noticeable gains in literacy
in limited time. Increasing participants’ levels of literacy and comfort in
reading English, even in a limited frame like workplace literacy, may increase
their dedication to their personal education.

Key Words

Workplace literacy
English for Specific Purposes

Areas
for Further Research

This sort of research should be piloted in other industries, and among non-workplace
related groups. For example, church-based ESL literacy programs might have similar
success in introducing adult populations to reading. Future research should
include pre- and post intervention assessment data on the learners L2 proficiency
and literacy levels.